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7 Things We Learned About Insomniac’s Wolverine From The Latest Previews
Marvel’s Wolverine is just about a month away from launching on PlayStation 5 , and several outlets got a chance to play Insomniac’s latest superhero blockbuster. We’ve read and watched them to round up some of the big takeaways, so here are a few things we learned about the game ahead of its September 15 launch.
Anyone who’s played Insomniac’s Spider-Man games knows that some of their much less popular segments kill your momentum swinging around as Spidey to have you sneak around as Mary Jane. Wolverine doesn’t seem to be making the same mistake, as Insomniac confirmed to GamesRadar+ that Wolverine is the only playable character this time around.
Though a few X-Men mainstays like Jean Grey, Mystique, and Sabretooth are showing up in this game, Wolverine takes place before the actual supergroup of mutants has actually formed. So it doesn’t sound like you’ll be hearing much of Charles Xavier and Magneto waxing philosophical about the future of mutantkind or Cyclops saying “To me, my X-Men.” But even so, this isn’t an origin story, and Logan will have plenty of established relationships with other characters as part of a different team called Team X formed by Nathaniel Essex, a character many fans will know as Mr. Sinister.
“Though Wolverine may be a game made from familiar pieces, Insomniac is putting them together in surprising ways,” Tamoor Hussain writes for GameSpot . “This became apparent from the intro, where a calm, wizened figure finds a feral Logan hiding in the wild and extends a helping hand. If you thought that person was Charles Xavier, founder of the X-Men, you’d be wrong. This time it’s Nathaniel Essex, the X-Men antagonist who will become known as Mister Sinister.”
Essex (played by Last of Us and Indiana Jones actor Troy Baker), is primarily a villain in the comics. Nathaniel is initially presented as an ally to Logan and co., however, having founded Team X, consisting of Mystique, Sabretooth, and Logan. It's unclear if he’ll stay on Wolverine’s side throughout the story, though.
“If Essex is going to become the villain of this story, that's going to be a late game twist,” writes Dustin Bailey for GamesRadar+ . “Insomniac dragged out the ultimate heel turn of Otto Octavius as Doctor Octopus in the 2018 Spider-Man game, which could be the blueprint for what's happening here..”
The Spider-Man games give you plenty of cool tricks to do that shake up combat, making it more than just a punch-and-kick-fest, but some folks say that Wolverine feels a little bit monotonous, comparatively speaking. Logan’s adamantium claws, rage-based strength, and self-healing abilities are great for tearing through enemies and taking hits, but compared to Spidey’s web-powered acrobatics and symbiote upgrades, Wolfie seems a little one-note.
“My overall impression of combat based on what I’ve played is that it’s all fundamentally sound, very satisfying, and does a great job of evoking the spirit of Wolverine, but at the same time, it felt like it was missing an element of creativity that I always look for in an action game,” Mitchell Saltzman writes for IGN . “One of the joys of Spider-Man ’s combat, for example, was all of the fun things you could do that weren’t necessarily the optimal way of clearing a combat encounter, but allowed you to break away from the monotony of just punch, parry, punch, parry, punch, parry, etc. You could bounce off walls, mantle over enemies, slide under them, web them up, yank away their weapons, swing them around, launch them up for an air combo, knock them away, pull them back, etc. Wolverine mostly just angrily stabs things, and while he is the best there is at what he does, I did wish that what [he] does offered a bit more variety.”
Elsewhere, IGN does acknowledge that the skill tree may give Logan more tools to fight with, but just how much more player expression this will open up remains to be seen.
Though the action is the stuff you put in flashy trailers, the preview also included a much more lowkey segment in which Logan walks around a town, hangs out with his mutant cohorts, and can do a little bit of exploring during some much-needed downtime.
“While much of the demo was spent with Wolverine snarling, growling, and prowling as he found new baddies to stick his claws into, there was one notable section that was much more quiet and subdued, and it actually ended up being my favorite stretch of gameplay,” IGN writes. “In it, Wolverine wanders through Lowtown, which is a bit of a safe haven for mutants to congregate. I was able to strike up conversations with fellow mutants, engage in some not-so-friendly arm wrestling with Sabertooth, play a revealing game of Never Have I Ever with Mystique, and even find a handful of Easter eggs tucked away. It was a welcome reprieve from all of the action, and I hope there are more moments like this where I get to learn more about the characters that inhabit the world.”
In an interview with VGC , Insomniac talked about balancing the ensemble cast with a story that would, at its core, be about Logan. That’s part of why the team chose to set the story at a point when the X-Men didn’t exist yet, and as such, some characters Insomniac wanted to include were removed in later drafts.
“For us it was important to start off with a story that can highlight Wolverine as a character – because of that, there’s no X-Men, largely because as soon as you introduce those giant personalities, all the oxygen gets sucked out of the room,” Creative Director Marcus Smith said. “Then it’s not a Wolverine game.
“So, what is going to make the best Wolverine game? We start with kind of a greatest hits. What are the things you think of? We know we’re going to have certain locations, certain characters – then we start building, what is the arc of that story? Paramount to that is what does he know, and how can he learn about these things through interactions with other characters?
“A lot of times we have characters that we really wanted ...
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